History of Japanese Anthropology

With the unification of Japan’s national territory at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the context of lasting political peace favoured the development of science and the arts, as well as the cultural empowerment of the country in relation to its neighbours. At that time, Japan began to question its identity in the face of the otherness encountered here and there during regular contacts, to respond to the pre-eminence of the Chinese civilizational model or to the proselytism of Christian missionaries, to stage its cultural centrality in the region, to draw up an inventory of its heritage or its provincial specificities, and finally, more generally, to establish scholarly practices in science that flourished, multiplied and specialized.

The study of this intellectual context is imperative first of all to grasp the foundations of a self-aware Japanese anthropology, as it emerged between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. It is indeed these achievements that formed Japan’s intellectual framework when new competing empires, the Russian or British in particular, arrived in the region. These frightened a country that had been relatively isolated from the world since the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, if the acquisition of intellectual and technical tools enabling Japan to fight with identical means became a government priority as soon as foreign powers sought to force their way into the country in the mid-nineteenth century, the effort to reorganize knowledge that was already well established must be fully appreciated. It supported and guided the willingness to acquire new knowledge.

Secondly, the birth of modern Japanese anthropology was part of the process of inventing a young nation-state, worried and fascinated by the power struggles that were being played out on its doorstep. It was only once the initial threat of the country’s annexation had been averted that Japanese anthropology would formalize its discourse and methods within institutions (universities, of course, but also many independent learned societies) newly created on an exogenous model to respond on equal scientific footing to the Western presence in Asia. Scientific relations between Japan and the West developed considerably between the end of the nineteenth century and the 1910s.

The Western expansionist and imperialist model would also be replicated in Japan and would allow Japanese anthropology to experience a third wave of development. From the beginning of the twentieth century, the Japanese colonial empire gradually extended over the entire region, towards Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria, South-East Asia and Insulinde, then towards the islands and archipelagos of the Pacific. Indeed, until 1945, the most dynamic institutionalized anthropological practice in Asia was that of a non-Western power, Japan.

In parallel with this development of Japanese anthropology from the end of the nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War, which was mainly in the academic world, other specificities of Japanese ethnographic sciences should be noted: the continuity of folk studies, a discipline related to anthropology and history, but concerned about its autonomy since the end of the nineteenth century; that of the historical importance of letters and literature in anthropological discourse; an aesthetic treatment of the subjects of study, as some ethnologists have never really accepted a Western division of arts and sciences perceived as Manichaean; an ethnology practised by a significant number of researchers not aligned with the methodological presuppositions of the dominant schools; a museum history that is sometimes stagnant; or a complex relationship with its counterparts on the international scene.

At the end of this intense period of formal development of Japanese anthropology until the end of the Second World War, it is also important to note the way in which the human sciences were reformulated in a country that was militarily defeated and occupied. Japan having lost its entire colonial territory, the postcolonial ethnological shift is much more sudden for this very reason and the misuses of the human sciences are more quickly debated. In the academic world, the expansionist enterprise was widely criticized as early as 1946 and, as early as the 1950s, a new generation of anthropologists was inspired by the American model to give a new direction to ethnology practised outside the metropolitan territory. On Japanese soil, folk studies were gaining visibility and legitimacy for having little association with the previous militaristic government (or, at least, more surreptitiously). The combination of these two factors allowed post-war Japanese anthropology to retain some very remarkable features.

During the same years, Japan was experiencing a rapid economic recovery which, at the same time, legitimized a new form of pride in the Japanese scientific enterprise and provided it with significant research funds. This rebirth would eventually be undermined by the abrupt end of the period of high growth, which was accompanied by several natural and human disasters between the last years of the twentieth and the first years of the twenty-first century, and which once again reconfigured the ambitions of Japanese anthropology.

Without ever claiming to produce a linear narrative, we aim here to isolate the threads and relationships that are specific to the nature of a practice conscious of its specificities, methods and developments. These are little known in the West since Japanese anthropology, although extremely fertile, is little translated and continues today to produce most of its results for a strictly Japanese audience. Our ambition is therefore to make its figures, motives and fundamentals known for the benefit of a non-Japanese readership.

Alice Berthon
Damien Kunik
Nicolas Mollard

See also Berthon, Alice, Damien Kunik & Nicolas Mollard, 2019. « Brève histoire de l’ethnologie au Japon (XVII^e-XXI^e siècles) », in BEROSE - International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.